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Taylor Swift threatens legal action against student tracking her private jet
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
225 points (93.8% liked)
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Of course carbon credits are bullshit, and there’s am definitely a lot more someone with a billion dollars to burn can do to actually cut their emissions, but let’s not pretend that the media paid all that much attention to her flying a lot until she started to acutely use her influence to push for things like voting for candidates that support stricter emissions laws and systematic change. Then it was suddenly very important to broadcast that she’s a big hypocrite so you shouldn’t care when she says people should do something like get out and vote.
I can also think of a lot of people with more infuance on world events than a musician, even a very famous one. Plenty of world leaders come to mind, as do the leaders of dozens of major corporations and religions.
Um….thats some crazy conspiracy bullshit.
See, as a logical person, I can get on board with bashing “the media” for being corporatist, for having profit in mind when they hype up stories and sensationalize news, for pounding the drums of war for profit, for being biased towards fairness, for being unable to give stories in context that show a crackpot for a crackpot, upholding the poisonous status quo, a lack of critical thinking, and a pretty good host of other shortcomings. But anytime someone starts talking about a unified “plot” or cohesive “media agenda,” you’re crossing way over the Liffey into crackpot world.
Why wouldn’t “the media” want people to vote? If she were making radical politics popular, if she were talking about dismantling media conglomerates or upending capitalism, then, yes, I could see a lot of outlets desperate to turn the public against her, but…”vote for Biden”—or, honestly, even just “vote” is not threatening the status quo. It’s upholding it.
“The media” would not give her endless hype and airtime and they wouldn’t lionize her for being a pop star if they were trying to “take her down.”
And by the way, “the media” still isn’t covering climate change properly, with nearly enough urgency—if they cover it at all. All these records being broken and they barely mention climate change. You think now they’re talking about climate change to distract from Taylor swift telling people to vote? Gtfoh
Really? It’s a crazy conspiracy that Rupert Murdoch, a right wing political activist, owns a critical mass of media outlets from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to Fox News and and associated outlets? That once a few of the more ‘respectable’ of his outlets run a story it’s far more likely to be picked up by other unrelated outlets doing their own take on said story because it’s now part of the conversation and represents a low effort high engagement story? There’s a reason that aggregators like Ground News can show you the same story in nearly every major outlet, and it’s not just that a lot of them come from the AP and Routers.
Or is it that someone like Murdoch would possibly think beyond one of his enterprise’s short term profits, when he personally sits on the charman’s advisory board of the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank he helps fund with the explicit goal of shaping political policy and discussion among both the US left and right?
Note, 44% of eligible US adults did not vote in the 2020 elections, and that election saw the highest voter turnout since 1900. When polled, about 44% of US adults identified as ’Swifties’, and of those 78% identified as Democratic or Independent. If we assume that Swifies are on average about as likely to stay home in november as any other, and that only the third of thouse who identified as her ‘rabid’ fans, and of those only the ones who identify as Democratic or Independent, were more likely to vote than before, that is still nearly thirty million new Democratic voters.
Do I think the actual effect is likely to be that dermatic? No. Do I think that a think tank which is funded by donations on the promise that they study such demographics and propose campaigns to aid the neoconservative cause would suggest the gobal community of networks they work with amplify an otherwise minor personal impact study on carbon emissions by giving it more airtime in the hopes that it has an effect on the fan base of someone who was otherwise getting more involved in politics, yes.
And the media does talk about Climate Change a lot. They don’t cover it well and tend to downplay its effects as well as the records we keep speeding through, but I would be hard pressed to find a single major daily newspaper that dodnt mention something to do with Climate Change or related policy at least once a day. And so and so is a hypocrite because they fly a lot is fundamentally the same exact argument as BP’s famous and highly successful 2003 advertising campaign to create the term Carbon Footprint.